Twenty years of Frontex: Twenty Years of Shame
There is no cause for celebration in this anniversary. This blog brings together writing from a week of commemoration to mark the 20-year anniversary of the European Border and Coastguard Agency, commonly known as Frontex. It considers some of its impacts across the project locations Collective Aid works in, before turning to consider matters further afield.
The 26th of October 2024 marked 20 years since the establishment of the European border and coast guard agency, commonly known as Frontex. As one of the European Union (EU)’s highest-funded agencies, Frontex’s role is to support the EU in the management of its external borders. Some of their responsibilities include border surveillance, search and rescue, and assisting in the returns of people on the move. As an EU agency, they are required to uphold people’s fundamental rights. In reality, Frontex’s presence has served only to militarise Europe’s borders. By placing growing numbers of officers along the EU’s external borders and funnelling millions of Euros into surveillance technologies, they have contributed to an image of people on the move as a threat to be fought off at any cost - even at the expense of their human rights - and their lives.
Mountains of evidence proves their consistent failure to report illegal pushback practices, and in some instances directly participating in the pushbacks themselves. Moreover, they have repeatedly failed to call for life-saving support to people in emergency situations, which has resulted in countless preventable deaths of people merely looking for safety. In essence, Frontex have become the architects and guards of Fortress Europe, enabled to act with impunity. This is an outrage.
France - Increased cooperation, increased hostilities
In 2024, cooperation between Frontex and the French and British authorities has increased along the France-UK border. The reality is that Frontex operations in this region exacerbate the dangers faced by people attempting to cross the channel and exercise their legal right to claim asylum in the UK. Instead of saving lives, as they claim, their activities are geared toward assisting the French authorities in intercepting people on the move before they attempt a channel crossing, and facilitating the subsequent, regularly violent shore patrol tactics which follow.
Resources clearly exist to support search and rescue operations at the France-UK border. Driven by false rhetoric, the focus is placed instead on criminalising the people who attempt to make these crossings. This unbearable outcomes of this rhetoric continue apace, as we saw on Friday, with the tragic news that a baby died in the Channel, the 53rd person to have lost their life this year alone - the deadliest year on record for crossings. Frontex’s involvement in the region can be added to the list of its controversial operations at the borders of the European Union, raising urgent questions about the agency’s role in perpetuating harm to people on the move.
We remember Dina Al Shammari, Sirwan Alipour, and Kazhal Ahmed Khidhir and her three children, Hadiya, Mubin, and Hasti. Six names, written here to honour the memory of every name in a list of hundreds. Each one, a person with a unique, multifaceted life, stolen from them at this border. We denounce the policies and rhetoric which, in governing it, have led, and continue to lead, to loss of life and suffering on this unbearable scale.
Greece - Pushbacks and accountability
Mountains of evidence proves the consistent failure of Frontex to report illegal pushback practices, directly participating in pushbacks themselves, or failing to call for life-saving support to people in emergency situations, which has resulted in countless preventable deaths. In Greece, journalists and human rights activists have documented instances of active participation by Frontex in illegal pushbacks and human rights violations at both land and sea borders. A joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi concluded that Frontex was complicit in and aware of several illegal pushbacks in the Aegean Sea in 2020 and 2022.
Following the deadly Pylos shipwreck in 2023, the biggest ever maritime tragedy in the Mediterranean, Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Officer recommended a temporary suspension of operations in Greece under Article 46 of the Frontex regulation, due to serious violations of fundamental rights and international protection obligations. Despite this, the agency’s Executive Director and Management Board decided to continue operations.
Another blog on this page looks in more detail at the ways in which the Greek state, and a significant proportion of its media, work together to contribute to the increasingly hostile framing of migration in which Frontex operates on land and at sea with near-impunity.
We stand in anger and sorrow with those who loved Riyadh, Tariq, and the hundreds lost from the Adriana at Pylos, with the survivors of the shipwreck, and with the 9 survivors criminalised by the Greek state for a year afterwards before all charges against them were dropped. We remember the many thousands of individual lives, lost at Evros, in the Aegean, and across Greece, and stand in solidarity with survivors of camps like Mória, and those still subjected to inhumane conditions in closed camps and detention centres on the islands and mainland today.
Bosnia and Herzegovina -The road to accession
For years, BiH has been promised accession to the EU, and for years, the EU has left little doubt that it will only grant BiH accession if it co-operates with the externalization of the EU’s increasingly militarized borders in the service of the EU’s border regime. In essence, BiH has been prevailed upon to treat people on the move as ‘security threats’ to be kept away from EU member states in exchange for future membership.
In late 2022, three years after BiH submitted its application for membership of the European Union, the European Council granted the status of candidate country to BiH on the condition that BiH would commit itself to fulfilling eight specific steps. ‘Migration management’ and the strengthening of the country’s borders through international co-operation with the EU and with its Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) were prioritized as key accession requirements (“Step 6”). Since then, the EU has repeatedly urged the signing of a Status Agreement between BiH and Frontex. This Status Agreement would enable Frontex to operate in BiH in order to reinforce the impermeability of the country’s already deadly borders and prevent those seeking asylum from entering the EU via the Western Balkan country. In fact, BiH’s Minister of Security, Nesad Nešic, has repeatedly emphasized cooperation with Frontex as a mechanism primarily necessary for joining the EU, even acknowledging that EU countries will benefit most from the agreement.
In light of widespread evidence of Frontex’s complicity in the brutal human rights violations taking place against people on the move at Europe’s borders, the EU’s instrumentalisation of BiH’s candidacy to expand Frontex operations reveals exactly where the EU’s true priorities lie. With EU membership so stringently tied to the violent securitization of borders, the example of Frontex and the road to accession in Bosnia and Herzegovina raises troubling questions about what it means to be a part of the EU, now and in the future.
Serbia - The militarization of non-EU borders
As one of the European Union (EU)’s highest-funded agencies, Frontex’s role is to support the EU in the management of its external borders. In reality, its presence serves only to militarise them. Since 2021, this has been demonstrated in Serbia with devastating consequences.
In June this year, the EU signed an agreement with Serbia to increase Frontex’s cooperation in the country. Not only will this increase their presence along EU external borders, but for the first time it will allow them to operate along Serbia’s non-EU borders, such as with Bosnia and North Macedonia. As part of this new agreement, Ylva Johansson, the EU commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, stated that Frontex officers will work ‘under command of Serbian authorities’. Serbian authorities already face many allegations of illegal pushbacks. In March, a video was published by The Guardian showing a group of men stripped down to their boxers by Serbian police and forced back over the border with North Macedonia. As an EU agency, Frontex must uphold people’s fundamental rights and can terminate or suspend operations when they are aware of such violations. With knowledge of Serbia’s ongoing practices, they should be suspending operations with immediate effect. Instead, their involvement in this region only seems to grow. Once again, they turn a blind-eye to glaringly obvious instances of human rights abuses.Once again, people pay for the EU border regime with their lives at its peripheries.
In cemeteries in Serbia, and across the Balkans, stand graves marked with the initials ‘NN. This stands for ‘Nomen nescio’ which is Latin, for, ‘I do not know the name’. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),places the number of people who go missing at Europe’s southern borders and are never found at 87%. For European land routes, no such estimates even exist.
In memory of every ‘NN’, and every person yet to be found. For every person, named and unarmed, who has lost their lives on the Balkan route. May you rest in peace.
Israel - Funding genocide
The Israeli arms industry plays a significant role in the processes Frontex oversees and reinforces. It’s been estimated that €164 million of public money has been spent directly financing the Israeli war machine since 2018. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Frontex awarded €100m in contracts to Israeli companies:€50m to the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Airbus, for its Heron drone, and €50m to Israeli arms company Elbit Systems for use of its Hermes 900 drone. Both drones systems have been used by the Israeli military to attack and oppress the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank for years. The public money being used to fulfil the Frontex-Israel agreements also makes EU citizens directly complicit in the genocide being perpetuated in Gaza today. Palestinians seeking respite and refuge in Europe from Israel’s barbaric and relentless attacks continue to be persecuted by the same technology in the Aegean and on islands like Samos and Lesvos.
Frontex’s published values include references to ‘excellence and ‘high ethical standards’. They say that they ‘care about people.’ We ask: How do they align these values with their direct involvement in practices which endanger and terrorise at the EU borders, and support genocide further afield? Over 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last year, according to the latest estimate from Palestine’s health ministry. For how much longer will Europe continue to legitimise the horrors being perpetuated in Gaza and the West Bank by Israel?
As it stands, Frontex already has 2000 uniformed officers guarding Europe’s external borders and beyond. By 2027, they aim to increase this number to 10,000. With such a drastic increase in scale, Europe’s borders will reach unprecedented levels of surveillance and securitisation. With their 2027 budget set at €1.26 billion, this will come at a huge cost to the EU taxpayer. As it becomes increasingly difficult for people to enter the EU to exercise their legal right to claim asylum, the true cost will be in the lives which are destroyed in the process.
Our posts over the past week have, on the surface, been about Frontex. But at their core - and at the real heart of these discussions - are the people who come into contact with Frontex as they try to cross borders. They are the ones who bear the brunt of the disastrous EU policies that manifest themselves in violence and exclusion.
Last week, we spoke to a man from Afghanistan who told us why he had to leave his homeland behind. He told us of the suffering he had endured under the Taliban regime, and how they had killed his father. Travelling alone towards Europe in order to escape these horrors, he explained how he had been pushed back and beaten by European border officials. This dehumanisation is a direct consequence of the increasing militarisation of Europe’s borders, and an operating model enforced by Frontex which relies on an image of refugees as a ‘threat’ to be fought off.
Europe must reject Frontex. We must welcome those in need of a place of safety, and we must create safe passages for them to arrive.
Words and research by Dan Schoolar, Maria Kalochristianaki, Fargol Malekpoosh, Genevieve Skudder and Poppy Groves